


This Cloud Of Unknowing

by Omorka



Category: Real Ghostbusters
Genre: Gen, Precognition
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-07
Updated: 2010-03-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 19:23:43
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,015
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/68381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omorka/pseuds/Omorka
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The life of a precog is never easy, a precog in denial doubly so.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Cloud Of Unknowing

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for Challenge #46: Seer at LJ's Small Fandom Flash community. Title stolen from Joe Jackson.

"So what's the new gadget?" Peter asked casually, grabbing one of the ladder-backed chairs and turning it around so he could straddle it and rest his arms across the top rung.

Ray carefully finished turning a tiny screw into place and pushed back his goggles. "It's essentially a long-range PKE meter." He picked up something that looked like a bullhorn had mated with a catcher's mitt made entirely of chicken wire; a thick rainbow cable ran to the top of a slightly bulkier-than-normal PKE meter without its antennae. "It sacrifices some precision for distance - I could stand in the street with it and find Slimer, but I wouldn't know exactly where he was. Still, it could keep us from being surprised by a Class Seven when we were expecting a Class Five."

Peter looked slightly surprised. "That's nifty," he said, sounding only slightly sarcastic. "Looks like it uses both hands, though."

"Yeah, at the moment, it does," Ray agreed. "It's not done yet, though. Maybe I could helmet-mount the antenna?"

"Sure," Peter agreed, nodding. That was what tipped Ray off; that should have been the straight line for a joke. Ray turned to face Peter and tugged the safety goggles off completely. "Okay, what do you need, Peter?"

Peter grimaced. "That transparent today, Tex? I'm losing my touch."

"Or I'm getting better at reading you." Ray normally wouldn't have said anything so self-aggrandizing, but he needed to keep Peter from veering off again or they'd spend the rest of the afternoon beating around the bush. "Seriously, what's up?"

"Well," Peter started, looking up at the light fixture, "it hit me this morning - you know, all of our specialties have some sort of way of predicting future events. Winston's got divine prophesy, Spengs has statistics and computer modeling, you've got the various divination methods, and my field has precognition." He glanced at Ray's face, then back upwards. "I know what the supposed margin for error in the first two are; heck, stats even has ways of saying how not-certain you are. And mine's, well, fuzzy." He fidgeted and re-folded his arms on the chair. "What about yours? If someone scries, I don't know, a plane crash in a crystal ball, are they allowed to try to prevent it, or is it fixed once they've seen it?"

"There are a bunch of different theories," Ray answered slowly. "The one I think has the most evidence says that what a good diviner sees, in whatever method they use, is the most probable future, but that circumstances can change the outcome. So yeah, I'd say if someone saw a plane crash, they'd be being irresponsible if they _didn't_ try to change it, or at least warn people." He shifted his chair to face Peter. "What did you see this time?"

"Aw, c'mon, Ray, I think about things other than me _once_ in a while," Peter protested, hands out.

Ray began ticking things off on his fingers. "You slept past the alarm this morning, but you got up before noon. You went straight to the shower instead of coming down and getting coffee and breakfast first. You're in your uniform even though we don't have any scheduled busts for today, which means you think we're going to get called. You haven't teased me, Egon, Janine, or Slimer once yet this morning. And you _never_ talk about this stuff if it's not already on your mind; you get annoyed at Egon and me if we try to bring it up. All that adds up to: you had a precog dream, or at least one you think might be one, and it's bothering you. Now, cough up." He folded his arms across his chest.

"You've been spending too much time with Egon." Peter pouted at him for a moment, then gave in. "Yeah, okay. I dreamed we got called on an emergency bust, guessed it was a Class Six from the description. Kind of flash-forwarded from there, so I don't know exactly where it was. We were in some big, dark, sort of concrete warehouse-looking space, and we'd lost the spook and then got surprised; Winston and I were separated from you and Egon while we were wrestling with it." Peter's face, normally pale, lost what little color it had; he swallowed, his eyes tracing the dream-memory instead of the table. "It suddenly rushed away, and we heard the screams, and took off running, but we got there . . . too late. The ghost had - thrown you and Egon off a ledge down to a lower level." He closed his eyes and took a long, deliberate breath. "That was where I woke up. It could just be another nightmare. I hope it is. But it - it feels a lot like the Sandman dream did."

Ray wanted to ask whether Peter had seen what happened to him and Egon in the dream, but he didn't want to upset him further. It must be fairly bad, to have Peter on edge enough to talk about it as a possible precog event. Usually he tried to deny it had happened, if he realized that was what it was. The only reason he'd talked about the Sandman dream at the breakfast table was that he _hadn't_ known yet.

Instead, Ray nodded. "Okay. We'll take extra precautions. We'll be careful not to split up, or let a specter herd us in different directions. And I promise to stay away from ledges and cliffs."

"Okay. You, and the big guy, too." Peter scooted back on the chair slightly. "Just make sure you remember that in the heat of the moment, okay, little buddy? You get enthusiastic, and you - " He gestured with one hand, fingers running off across the table.

"I'll remember. It's okay, Peter." Ray bent his head towards the bits of wire that decorated his end of the table. For a moment, he considered trying to scry with them, but it seemed silly. Besides, he'd never shown much evidence of that sort of gift. "And - thanks, for telling me."

"Thanks for listening to me worry." Peter grinned apologetically and stood, dropping one hand to Ray's shoulder and squeezing briefly. "It's probably nothing."

"Well, let's hope so. But forewarned is forearmed." Ray picked up the screwdriver again.

"Actually, between us, we're eight-armed." Peter grinned at his own joke and headed for the stairs as Ray aimed at another loose connection.

\---

The emergency call, to Peter's relief, had been for a pair of Class Threes hassling a hot-dog stand near the park. Catching them had been a matter of a minute's strategizing and ten minutes of running, shooting, and yelling. No one even got slimed, which Peter considered a victory. They had them in the box and were ready to head home when the car phone in Ecto rang.

"It's an office building downtown," Janine explained, reading off the address. "Big ugly blue thing with tusks like a walrus, he said. Be careful, guys. Sounded stronger than the usual Class Five - maybe a Class Six. They said to hurry, it was really tearing up the place."

"The ghost in the dream was big, blue, and had tusks," Peter murmured to Ray as he fastened his seatbelt.

"Relax," Ray said across the back of the bench seat as Peter fidgeted. "The space you described in the dream didn't sound like an office building." He blinked at Peter's expression. "But we'll be careful anyway."

"You really should begin keeping a dream diary," Egon mentioned, leaning forward. "It's possible that you're having precognitive events on a regular basis and forgetting them because they're not recorded."

"That might explain a couple of deja vu moments I've had, but really, Egon, I don't think that's likely." Peter tucked his hands into his armpits. "I haven't had this sort of sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach in a long time."

Winston glanced back. "You wanna call this one off, Pete?"

"Heck, no." Peter faked a grin. "And lose out on the money?"

Egon and Ray looked at each other and passed some message using only their eyebrows. Peter wondered vaguely how they did it, before remembering that he did that with both of them just as often.

They parked Ecto in the fire zone and piled through the doors into the main lobby, where a middle-aged receptionist waved them over, despite being drenched in blue slime. "So glad you could make it. The beast is on the twentieth floor - or at least, that's where it was when they sent me down."

Egon pulled out his meter and watched the screen as the antennae blipped. "It's out of range," he grumbled.

"I'm on it," Ray replied, and dashed back outdoors. He returned with the chicken-wire bullhorn in one hand and the overstuffed meter in the other. "Definite Class Six readings above us. I'd guess Floor 18 from the distance here."

They piled into the elevator and headed up to the twentieth floor, planning to work their way down. As soon as they exited, they were half-assaulted by a man in a stiff grey suit. "Ghostbusters, thank God you're here! It's destroying magnetic media - disks, tapes, that sort of thing - it ran out on this floor and headed downward. You've got to stop it before it gets to the mainframe!"

Egon and Ray consulted and decided to head directly to the eighteenth floor; the four of them marched down two flights of stairs in formation, and burst into the hallway just in time to see something that looked like a walrus mated with a hippo gulp down a box of floppies.

It had the face of the thing from his dream, but this was much fatter - the dream-ghost was longer, almost eel-like. Peter relaxed fractionally. That face was still far too familiar, though.

Peter called out, "Hit it!" and fired, his stream joined nearly instantly by three others. The shots hit their mark, but shakily, and the bulky thing bawled like a wounded moose, shook its bulk, stretched itself ten times its length into something vaguely serpentine, and swam through the floor.

Peter swallowed, hard. That form, the stretched-out sea-serpent shape - that was it. He glanced at Ray and Egon, then away again as his throat went dry.

"That is one ugly gooper," Winston noted as they pounded back into the stairwell.

"No lie," grunted Peter.

"I don't recognize it from Tobin's; do you, Egon?" Ray asked, unable to keep the excitement out of his voice. The antenna bounced from his belt, swinging dangerously close to his knees; he scooped it up and re-clipped it without looking.

"No, and that concerns me." Egon stopped to look at the meter, then shook his head. "It seems to have skipped several floors. If it's one of a specific type of entity, it's one that hasn't been encountered in this area before. If it's unique, that brings up the question of how and why it got here."

"Let's worry about that after we have it safely in containment," Peter gasped. He hated stairs. He hoped he sounded more confident than he felt.

Ray grabbed the antenna and swung it around. "Looks like it went all the way down to the basement!"

"In that case," Winston asked, panting, "can we take the elevator?"

\---

The elevator doors opened onto Peter's nightmare; his knuckles went white on his thrower. "A parking garage. Why didn't I recognize it?"

"Because the lights are out," Winston suggested. "Ray, can you figure out what the deal is here?"

"I think our gooper caused a short," Ray said, pointing at a panel on the wall that was covered in ectoplasm and sparking dangerously. "Keep your eyes peeled; it can't be too far - "

He was interrupted by a roar as a long, twining shape barreled into them, knocking Winston over. Peter yelled and fired wildly; Ray ducked to get out of his way and dropped the long-range meter in favor of his thrower, letting it dangle from his belt again. Egon dodged towards Winston and suddenly found himself on the wrong side of a loop of the specter's body. He doubled back, and discovered he was now next to Ray.

"Guys? Where are you?" Peter shouted from the other side of the creature's massive bulk. It turned to face him, tusks scraping the concrete, and bellowed. Peter backed up a step and looked around wildly.

"Heads up!" Winston rolled to his feet and fired at the ghost from just under its chin. It screeched and swatted at him with a flipper; Peter got his thrower up and fired into its eyes, but he already knew what was coming.

The specter backed up, throwing coils of itself to either side. Peter heard Egon shouting somewhere already too far away, too close to the railing that separated the spiral exit ramp from the long drop to the lowest sub-basement. Peter screamed and fired; Winston's hand went for a trap; the ghost turned away, flung itself towards the ramp, curled up and away through the ceiling as something fell away beneath it -

Peter was running in slow motion, through molasses, against a hurricane wind. He knew he was screaming Egon's name only because he remembered the echoes of his voice in the dream; he couldn't hear anything except the pounding of his own feet, and Winston's right behind him. He got to the railing and almost didn't lean over. He knew what he'd see.

He closed his eyes, and the dream's final image flashed through his forebrain: Egon and Ray, crumpled and broken three stories down, with a slow seep of blood spreading under Ray's head.

He forced himself to look down.

For a moment, he didn't see anything. Winston grabbed his arm. "Look! Are they okay?"

He looked straight down. A floor below them, Ray had a death-grip on the antenna dish and the new meter, with the rainbow cable wrapped around the railing. Just below him, Egon clung frantically to Ray's legs, his own almost long enough to reach the rail below them.

"Hold on, we're coming!" Peter shouted as Winston charged down the ramp, wasting no time on words.

Something gibbered above them, and a drop of blue slime fell onto Peter's shoulder. Eyes wild, he whirled and fired straight up, catching the Class Six directly in the mouth, and dialed the thrower to full power. "Gotcha, you bastard!"

\---

"I can't believe I let it happen anyway," Peter said morosely. He handed Ray a bowl of buttered popcorn; Slimer had accidentally spilled the first one, and then cleaned it up with his tongue.

"It's okay, Peter," Ray assured him. He'd dislocated a shoulder stopping their fall with the new meter, which had taken terminal damage from its off-label use, but all things considered, he felt pretty lucky. "If I hadn't had a hint what was going to happen, I wouldn't have had enough time to think about how to stop it."

Egon nodded. He had some bruises from being thrown against the railing before going over, but was otherwise unscathed. "Ray was as prepared as it was possible to be. I admit, I panicked when I realized it was going to throw us down instead of merely pushing us off; I grabbed on to Ray instead of trying for the railing myself."

"I'm just grateful the cable held," Winston noted.

"Me too," Ray agreed, tossing a handful of popcorn into his mouth.

Egon and Winston headed towards the phone, debating whether or not to call Janine and tell her what had happened or merely to explain in the morning. Peter settled carefully onto the couch next to Ray. "Anything I can do?"

"Stop seeing me dead." Ray's voice was light, but the look in his eyes was anything but.

Peter flinched. "Sorry. That may take a day or two."

Ray sighed. "No, I'm sorry, that was too blunt. God, Peter, once you saw the thing and recognized it, you were looking at me and Egon like dead men walking, like you'd already lost hope."

"It wasn't - I didn't -" Peter stopped himself and took a couple of kernels to stall for time while he sorted out his thoughts. "I was just scared, Ray. I didn't know how to stop it."

"Was it exactly like the dream?" Ray asked, curiosity overcoming his fear of morbidity.

"Close enough. I think it took Winston longer to get up in the dream, and you didn't have the thingy at all." Peter rubbed at his temples. "But I guess we know we can change things, now. Either that, or it wasn't a precog dream at all, just a huge coincidence."

"I don't think even the most skeptical mind could be convinced of that," Egon mused, settling into the overstuffed chair gingerly. "Winston's on the phone with Janine. She's threatening to come back here and ply us with ice packs and chicken soup until we recover." He smiled wryly.

"I wouldn't mind some homemade chicken soup," Peter said wistfully. Ray bopped him with a throw pillow, grinning.

"I told her we would no doubt be stiff and sore and much more receptive to her ministrations tomorrow," Egon admitted.

Ray chuckled. "As long as no one calls your mom to administer some of her home remedies."

"Oh, horrors, no," Egon said, eyes wide. He was only slightly exaggerating.

Peter leaned back into the seat. "So, how does a dream diary work, anyway? I mean, I've read about them for psych work, the Jungians are really big on that sort of thing, but for this sort of stuff?"

"We should all start keeping one, and we should try working on lucid dreaming again, too," Ray suggested.

"I agree; it's entirely likely that exposure to ectoplasm and psychokinetic energy over time have raised all of our background psi levels," Egon added.

"So, I guess I'm hitting the books once you two are comfortable again." Peter grinned wider than he felt; messing with the future still didn't sit well with him. But at least his friends were doing their best to keep him from feeling he was going there alone.


End file.
